Minute on Education (1835) by Thomas Babington Macaulay

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Minute by the Hon'ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835.

[1] As it seems to be the opinion of some of the gentlemen who compose the Committee of Public Instruction that
the course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by the British Parliament in 1813 and as, if that
opinion be correct, a legislative act will be necessary to warrant a change, I have thought it right to refrain from taking any
part in the preparation of the adverse statements which are.now before us, and to reserve what I had to say on the subject
till it should come before me as a Member of the Council of India.

[2] It does not appear to me that the Act of Parliament can by any art of contraction be made to bear the meaning
which has been assigned to it. It contains nothing about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied. A
sum is set apart ’’for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for
the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories.” It is
argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanscrit literature;
that they never would have given the honourable appellation of ”a learned native” to a native who was familiar with the
poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics of Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name
only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of cusa-grass, and all the
mysteries of absorption into the Deity. This does not appear to be a very satisfactory interpretation. To take a parallel case:
Suppose that the Pacha of Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe, but now sunk far below
them, were to appropriate a sum for the purpose ”of reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of
Egypt,” would any body infer that he meant the youth of his Pachalik to give years to the study of hieroglyphics, to search
into all the doctrines disguised under the fable of Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with which
cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency if, instead of employing his young
subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the
sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?

[3] The words on which the supporters of the old system rely do not bear them out, and other words follow which
seem to be quite decisive on the other side. This lakh of rupees is set apart not only for "reviving literature in India," the
phrase on which their whole interpretation is founded, but also "for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the
sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories"— words which are alone sufficient to authorize all the changes for
which I contend.

[4] If the Council agree in my construction no legislative act will be necessary. If they differ from me, I will propose
a short act rescinding that I clause of the Charter of 1813 from which the difficulty arises.

[5] The argument which I have been considering affects only the form of proceeding. But the admirers of the oriental
system of education have used another argument, which, if we admit it to be valid, is decisive against all change. They
conceive that the public faith is pledged to the present system, and that to alter the appropriation of any of the funds which
have hitherto been spent in encouraging the study of Arabic and Sanscrit would be downright spoliation. It is not easy to
understand by what process of reasoning they can have arrived at this conclusion. The grants which are made from the
public purse for the encouragement of literature differ in no respect from the grants which are made from the same purse
for other objects of real or supposed utility. We found a sanitarium on a spot which we suppose to be healthy. Do we
thereby pledge ourselves to keep a sanitarium there if the result should not answer our expectations? We commence the
erection of a pier. Is it a violation of the public faith to stop the works, if we afterwards see reason to believe that the
building will be useless? The rights of property are undoubtedly sacred. But nothing endangers those rights so much as the
practice, now unhappily too common, of attributing them to things to which they do not belong. Those who would impart
to abuses the sanctity of property are in truth imparting to the institution of property the unpopularity and the fragility of
abuses. If the Government has given to any person a formal assurance— nay, if the Government has excited in any person's
mind a reasonable expectation— that he shall receive a certain income as a teacher or a learner of Sanscrit or Arabic, I
would respect that person's pecuniary interests. I would rather err on the side of liberality to individuals than suffer the
public faith to be called in question. But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain
sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me quite
unmeaning. There is not a single word in any public instrument from which it can be inferred that the Indian Government
ever intended to give any pledge on this subject, or ever considered the destination of these funds as unalterably fixed.

But, had it been otherwise, I should have denied the competence of our predecessors to bind us by any pledge on such a

subject. Suppose that a Government had in the last century enacted in the most solemn manner that all its subjects should,
to the end of time, be inoculated for the small-pox, would that Government be bound to persist in the practice after
Jenner's discovery? These promises of which nobody claims the performance, and from which nobody can grant a release,
these vested rights which vest in nobody, this property without proprietors, this robbery which makes nobody poorer, may
be comprehended by persons of higher faculties than mine. I consider this plea merely as a set form of words, regularly
used both in England and in India, in defence of every abuse for which no other plea can be set up.

[6] I hold this lakh of rupees to be quite at the disposal of the Governor-General in Council for the purpose of
promoting learning in India in any way which may be thought most advisable. I hold his Lordship to be quite as free to
direct that it shall no longer be employed in encouraging Arabic and Sanscrit, as he is to direct that the reward for killing
tigers in Mysore shall be diminished, or that no more public money shall be expended on the chaunting at the cathedral.

[7] We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the
intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing
it?

[8] All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of
India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched
from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides,
that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at
present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.

[9] What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee maintain that it should be the English. The other
half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be— which language is the best
worth knowing?

[10] I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of
their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at
home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at
the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western
literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

[1 1] It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest
is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry
could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which
facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable.
It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books
written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at
preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is
nearly the same.

[12] How then stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their
mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to
recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not
inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, —with models of every species of eloquence, —with historical
composition, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of
ethical and political instruction, have never been equaled— with just and lively representations of human life and human
nature, —with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade, —with full and
correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or
to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all
the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the
literature now extant in that language is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in
all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is
spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce
throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the
south of Africa, the other in Australia, —communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely
connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of

this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would
be the most useful to our native subjects.

[13] The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach
languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own,
whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they
differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history,
we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which
would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty
thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

[14] We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes several analogous cases, and they all teach the
same lesson. There are, in modem times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind
of a whole society, of prejudices overthrown, of knowledge diffused, of taste purified, of arts and sciences planted in
countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.

[15] The first instance to which I refer is the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the
fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost everything that was worth reading was contained
in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instmction has
hitherto noted, had they neglected the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of Cicero and Tacitus, had they
confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island, had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the
universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman French, —would England ever have been what she
now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India.
The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as
valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments— in history for example— I am certain that it
is much less so.

[16] Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation
which had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually
emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia.
There is now in that country a large educated class abounding with persons fit to serve the State in the highest functions,
and in nowise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to
hope that this vast empire which, in the time of our grandfathers, was probably behind the Punjab, may in the time of our
grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected?
Not by flattering national prejudices; not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old women's stories which
his rude fathers had believed; not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas; not by encouraging him to
study the great question, whether the world was or not created on the 13th of September; not by calling him "a learned
native" when he had mastered all these points of knowledge; but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the
greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. The languages of
western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

[17] And what are the arguments against that course which seems to be alike recommended by theory and by
experience? It is said that we ought to secure the co-operation of the native public, and that we can do this only by
teaching Sanscrit and Arabic.

[18] I can by no means admit that, when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the
education of a nation comparatively ignorant, the learners are absolutely to prescribe the course which is to be taken by
the teachers. It is not necessary however to say anything on this subject. For it is proved by unanswerable evidence, that
we are not at present securing the co-operation of the natives. It would be bad enough to consult their intellectual taste at
the expense of their intellectual health. But we are consulting neither. We are withholding from them the learning which is
palatable to them. We are forcing on them the mock learning which they nauseate.

[19] This is proved by the fact that we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanscrit students while those who learn
English are willing to pay us. All the declamations in the world about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred
dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh this undisputed fact, that we cannot find in all our vast
empire a single student who will let us teach him those dialects, unless we will pay him.

[20] I have now before me the accounts of the Mudrassa for one month, the month of December, 1833. The Arabic
students appear to have been seventy-seven in number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid to

them is above 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the account stands the following item:

Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the months of May, June, and July last— 103 rupees.

[21] I have been told that it is merely from want of local experience that I am surprised at these phenomena, and that
it is not the fashion for students in India to study at their own charges. This only confirms me in my opinions. Nothing is
more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant or
profitable. India is no exception to this rule. The people of India do not require to be paid for eating rice when they are
hungry, or for wearing woollen cloth in the cold season. To come nearer to the case before us: —The children who learn
their letters and a little elementary arithmetic from the village schoolmaster are not paid by him. He is paid for teaching
them. Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the
Sanscrit and Arabic are languages the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all
such subjects the state of the market is the detective test.

[22] Other evidence is not wanting, if other evidence were required. A petition was presented last year to the
committee by several ex-students of the Sanscrit College. The petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or
twelve years, that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science, that they had received
certificates of proficiency. And what is the fruit of all this? "Notwithstanding such testimonials," they say, "we have but
little prospect of bettering our condition without the kind assistance of your honourable committee, the indifference with
which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them."
They therefore beg that they may be recommended to the Governor-General for places under the Government— not places
of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist. "We want means," they say, "for a decent living,
and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom
we have been educated and maintained from childhood." They conclude by representing very pathetically that they are
sure that it was never the intention of Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon
them to destitution and neglect.

[23] I have been used to see petitions to Government for compensation. All those petitions, even the most
unreasonable of them, proceeded on the supposition that some loss had been sustained, that some wrong had been
inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners who ever demanded compensation for having been educated gratis, for
having been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into the world well furnished with literature
and science. They represent their education as an injury which gives them a claim on the Government for redress, as an
injury for which the stipends paid to them during the infliction were a very inadequate compensation. And I doubt not that
they are in the right. They have wasted the best years of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect.
Surely we might with advantage have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable. Surely, men may be
brought up to be burdens to the public and objects of contempt to their neighbours at a somewhat smaller charge to the
State. But such is our policy. We do not even stand neuter in the contest between truth and falsehood. We are not content
to leave the natives to the influence of their own hereditary prejudices. To the natural difficulties which obstruct the
progress of sound science in the East, we add great difficulties of our own making. Bounties and premiums, such as ought
not to be given even for the propagation of truth, we lavish on false texts and false philosophy.

[24] By acting thus we create the very evil which we fear. We are making that opposition which we do not find. What
we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit Colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth. It is bounty-money paid to
raise up champions of error. It goes to form a nest not merely of helpless placehunters but of bigots prompted alike by
passion and by interest to raise a cry against every useful scheme of education. If there should be any opposition among
the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by
persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more
formidable will that opposition be. It will be every year reinforced by recruits whom we are paying. From the native
society, left to itself, we have no difficulties to apprehend. All the murmuring will come from that oriental interest which
we have, by artificial means, called into being and nursed into strength.

[25] There is yet another fact which is alone sufficient to prove that the feeling of the native public, when left to
itself, is not such as the supporters of the old system represent it to be. The committee have thought fit to lay out above a
lakh of rupees in printing Arabic and Sanscrit books. Those books find no purchasers. It is very rarely that a single copy is
disposed of. Twenty-three thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the libraries or rather the lumber-rooms
of this body. The committee contrive to get rid of some portion of their vast stock of oriental literature by giving books
away. But they cannot give so fast as they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent in adding fresh masses of
waste paper to a hoard which, one should think, is already sufficiently ample. During the last three years about sixty
thousand rupees have been expended in this manner. The sale of Arabic and Sanscrit books during those three years has

not yielded quite one thousand rupees. In the meantime, the School Book Society is selling seven or eight thousand
English volumes every year, and not only pays the expenses of printing but realizes a profit of twenty per cent, on its
outlay.

[30] The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sanscrit books, and the Mahometan law from Arabic
books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to
ascertain and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a Law Commission has been given to us for that purpose. As soon
as the Code is promulgated the Shasters and the Hedaya will be useless to a moonsiff or a Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust
that, before the boys who are now entering at the Mudrassa and the Sanscrit College have completed their studies, this
great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things
which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.

[31] But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable. It is said that the Sanscrit and the Arabic
are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are on that account
entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant but
neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only
because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable
with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is
confined that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions.
We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We
abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of
converting the natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the
revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what
texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

[32] It is taken for granted by the advocates of oriental learning that no native of this country can possibly attain
more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this. But they perpetually insinuate it. They
designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling-book education. They assume it as
undeniable that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and science on the one
side, and superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an
assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently
to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of
our most idiomatic writers. There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific
questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing
discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the
Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the Continent, any foreigner
who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos. Nobody, I
suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth,
in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit College, becomes able to read, to
enjoy, and even to imitate not unhappily the compositions of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time which enables
an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.

[33] To sum up what I have said. I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813, that we are
not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied, that we are free to employ our funds as we choose, that we ought to
employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing, that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic, that
the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic, that neither as the
languages of law nor as the languages of religion have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our encouragement,
that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought
to be directed.

[34] In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them that it is
impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to
form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, —a class of persons Indian in blood
and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the
vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature,
and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

[35] I would strictly respect all existing interests. I would deal even generously with all individuals who have had fair
reason to expect a pecuniary provision. But I would strike at the root of the bad system which has hitherto been fostered

by us. I would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanscrit books. I would abolish the Mudrassa and the Sanscrit
College at Calcutta. Benares is the great seat of Brahminical learning; Delhi of Arabic learning. If we retain the Sanscrit
College at Bonares and the Mahometan College at Delhi we do enough and much more than enough in my opinion, for
the Eastern languages. If the Benares and Delhi Colleges should be retained, I would at least recommend that no stipends
shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair thither, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice
between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know. The funds
which would thus be placed at our disposal would enable us to give larger encouragement to the Hindoo College at
Calcutta, and establish in the principal cities throughout the Presidencies of Fort William and Agra schools in which the
English language might be well and thoroughly taught.

[36] If the decision of His Lordship in Council should be such as I anticipate, I shall enter on the performance of my
duties with the greatest zeal and alacrity. If, on the other hand, it be the opinion of the Government that the present system
ought to remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the chair of the Committee. I feel that I could not
be of the smallest use there. I feel also that I should be lending my countenance to what I firmly believe to be a mere
delusion. I believe that the present system tends not to accelerate the progress of truth but to delay the natural death of
expiring errors. I conceive that we have at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public Instruction. We
are a Board for wasting the public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are
printed was while it was blank— for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics,
absurd theology— for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an incumbrance and blemish, who live on
the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that, when they have
received it, they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I am
naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body which, unless it alters its whole mode of proceedings,
I must consider, not merely as useless, but as positively noxious.

T[homas] B[abington] MACAULAY

2nd February 1835.

I give my entire concurrence to the sentiments expressed in this Minute.

W[illiam] C[avendish] BENTINCK.

From: Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781-1839). Edited by H. Sharp. Calcutta:
Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920. Reprint. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965, 107-117.

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